


See You in Another Life

by jm_serendipitous



Category: Terminator Salvation (2009)
Genre: Fanmix, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-02
Updated: 2012-10-02
Packaged: 2017-11-15 12:24:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/527282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jm_serendipitous/pseuds/jm_serendipitous
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The writing blurbs from a T4 fanmix</p>
            </blockquote>





	See You in Another Life

Marcus knew things didn’t go the way they were supposed to; never have, never do, never will. But knowing it didn’t cement the unproven theory. He still thought, as he stared at the brick in his cell day in and day out for two years, the clock ticking over his head, counting his days left to breathe, that this of all things would play out as it should.

Man commits a crime, he is punished. Man commits murder, he is dead.

Even when Dr. Kogan slipped between the bars, a pale and listless death angel but glimmering with hope, and he’d signed those papers he thought there was nothing stopping him from being tossed head-first to the hellhounds. He’d tasted the grim reaper on her lips, glimpsed at what was coming.

He was ready, had prepared himself in all ways he could. He was barbarous, a murderer, and the axe would fall neatly on his neck.

Donating his body to science wasn’t an alternative to clemency. It wasn’t an alternative to anything…It wasn’t meant to be, anyway.

But he wakes in a cold sweat, moored tightly in a body bag, no holes to breathe only black. Buried alive, mistaken for dead, left to suffocate. (Aren’t the doctors required to check pulses to confirm the intended is actually deceased? What kind of fucked up prison is this? Fucking Texas.) He claws at the material, desperation multiplying with the panic, until it’s in near shreds and he can hear more than see that he’s broken through.

Then the smell hits; of gunpowder, smoke and burnt flesh.

\- - -

Swiping the jacket is like riding a bike.

He needs it, needs clothes in the rain, and doesn’t give the red band around the left bicep a second glance.

He knows the color of blood doesn’t symbolize anything good.

But hell if he’s going to get himself into anymore shit.

\- - -

He walks and walks, for days it feels like, having picked a direction and started, and yet he doesn’t get tired. Doesn’t eat, doesn’t sleep (he’s had enough sleep, he figures). On day three he comes up over a hill and those smells fall spectacularly into orbit.

The city of angels looks like it had a date with death and things hadn’t gone well, the skyscrapers now crumbled ruins and the streets laden with ash. Fractured bones crunch under his feet as he carefully ventures through the avenues and boulevards, as if any wrong step will trip a wire, causing whatever desecrated building beside him to collapse like domino blocks.

Everywhere he goes is empty. Every store, every house, every park, completely vacant of anything living (what is this place?). Even the toy manufacturing company he comes across has blown out windows and doors ripped from its hinges—

There, something out of the corner of his eye. A black mass up ahead, moving. He’s foolish enough to call out to it, waving his arm idiotically, but then the arm drops and he retreats subconsciously, a cold feeling dropping like stones in his gut.

_What_ is _that?_

That thing starts shooting, that thing which is so obviously _not_ human, the bullets scattering around him like firecrackers popping on Independence Day, and he’s tackled to the ground, just short of taking a round in the side, and shoved roughly under cover behind a car. The weight on top of him is light, nothing that can’t be unseated with a swatted hand, but the finger pressed in his face and the goggles staring down at him are enough to keep him paralyzed.

“Come with me if you want to live.”

He dubs it a testament to God when he scrambles to his feet and bolts after the swaddled soldier, a witness to what he didn’t realize he wanted until the gun began firing. They trek through, up, up, up the labyrinth of the toy factory until they burst onto the roof, in full view of the sun but away from the inhuman mercenary. A little girl crawls out from a hiding spot, shot gun unsteadily in hand, and from there the show truly unravels.

\- - -

It’s a load of cobblers, what he’s being told. Terminators, apocalypse—what the hell is Skynet?

“What day is it? What year?”

“2018.”

\- - -

“What was it like?” Marcus asks hours later, when the sun is retired and this soldier—Kyle Reese—has him convinced that they can’t make a fire no matter how cold it is in the pathetic excuse for headquarters.

Kyle shrugs, picking impartially at the plate of coyote. “I don’t remember.”

Marcus looks at him, inspects what he can in the darkness. Kyle is small, thin, young, barely anything (barely there), garments hanging off his body. Perhaps the clothes once belonged to someone else, someone who didn’t survive the catastrophe he’s been explaining to him, and he held on to them for whatever reason. Remnants of a war, dogtags from another man’s neck, hoarding what he could when he could.

In an alternate reality he’d be in high school, a sophomore probably, studying for tests and chasing girls instead of strategizing exit strategies and running to save his skin. Hardly seems fair. Any of it.

“How old were you?” he asks, casting a glance over his shoulder at the little girl. She—Star—slumbers tentatively in a mess of moth-eaten blankets on the other side of the tent, back to them, in a fetal curl.

“Not even two, I think.”

“So who did this then?” He doesn’t know why he keeps asking—sixth time and counting—but he thinks in the back of his mind maybe, maybe, the story will change into something more plausible if he keeps with it. More believable than ‘computers became aware, saw humans as a threat, set out to exterminate the race.’ “Was it Al Qaeda? The terrorists got sick of playing war so they came back and nuked us all, huh?”

Kyle stares at him, trying to figure Marcus out as Marcus is trying to figure him out. “I told you, Skynet did this. What rock have you been living under?”

“You haven’t told me what the fuck Skynet is. All you’ve said is that it’s a computer database—”

“That became self-aware, yeah. In 2003.”

It doesn’t make sense, none of this does. How he’s sitting here, how the city is gone, how—Star makes a sound from across the way, the faintest of whimpers but it berates his ears like a gong. He straightens, craning to look over the table littered with stuff, suddenly alert. But she sleeps still, hat askew atop her hazardous curls.

“She has nightmares,” Kyle explains idly, setting the plate aside and shifting to rest his head on a stack of boxes. He focuses on the patch of stars just visible through a hole in the tent, hands folding in his lap.

Marcus heeds him no attention, proceeds to keep lookout. Star is small as well and shakes too easily, fragile in disaster laden with carnage, having been robbed of what so many before her—himself included—have taken for granted. The innocence of childhood, the gaiety of freedom and being carefree, without any real worries.

There is no innocence, however, for the children of war, no rest for the painted, scarred and non-glorified warriors.

It’s not fair, unjustifiable, unredeemable how brittle she looks in an era of desolation and how young but prematurely mature she is, immensely so compared to Kyle who at least understands circumstances which cannot be changed.

“Sounds like life’s a little hard all around,” he observes.

Kyle sighs, far away and not coming back before his due. “Shit falls apart like it’s supposed to, roadkill. No stopping it.”

These aren’t soldiers, not warriors. They’re kids. Two chicks guarding a henhouse from an army of foxes.

“What was it like before?” 

\- - -

Where does determination to survive give way to wafting the white flag?

Marcus ponders this, rooted in the small distance between his pack and this band of rogues whose territory they’ve managed to stumble into. Four men and one woman, fresh blood trickling down their chins, catching in the crevices, a dismembered hand, raggedly ripped from its seams, clenched between the woman’s fingers.

Their equal jungle eyes leer at them from beneath matted hair, the new prey, a hunt afoot. After two long days of driving, their quick bathroom break interrupted a frenetic feeding by mistake and they unintentionally proved to be more enticing than any carcass that was easily dismissed in the sun to dry for the vultures to pick at.

Star trembles, despite Kyle’s arm securely around her, despite Marcus’ tower in front of her. Marcus wants to chuck Kyle in behind him as well, a kneejerk reaction to instincts flaring that this is _bad_ , but the kid stands defiant, a lone wolf, Ithaca Stakeout tucked loosely at his side, still not fully trusting of the left fielder. Marcus feels an unexpected bout of pride at that, as strong as the gravitational pull, but brushes it aside as the man upfront, presumably the ringleader, takes a step forward.

Medium height with disintegrating muscle and an unruly beard bracketing his weathered face, the barest of tilts tips his head before he makes a roaring charge at the intruders. Marcus feels Star jump behind him in fright, Kyle meanwhile starting promptly, readying the gun even as Marcus backs them towards the truck with an outstretched arm.

Four hits—one fist in the jaw, a foot in the abdomen, and two punches more—renders the man unconscious. The moment his body hits the sand his comrades attack. All at once he has the wrongful adversary on him, taking punches and dropkicks and bites, their barks singing, while the woman, having tossed aside her extra limb for the brawl, creeps around, eyes hungrily on Star. With a battle cried, “No,” Marcus grabs hold of her by the scruff of the neck and flings, she slamming her head into a rock and crumbling in an immobile heap.  

Kyle jumps in not a moment later, grabbing shirts and yanking and punching. He cracks one man over the head with the butt of the rifle, he pooling, boneless, at his feet, but, being gaunt and untrained, Kyle’s moves are messy and ineffective, belittling him to effortless manhandling. Marcus shouts tips and advice when he can, but soon enough he takes the fight into his own hands, ignoring his green partner.

It shortly lasts, each of the men going down faster than the first when he isn’t babysitting and is focused on protecting his pack. But the woman, forgotten and thus given the perfect opportunity for a pre-emptive strike, launches onto Marcus’ back, throwing him spectacularly off balance, she hissing in his ear, the metallic smell of blood like sucking on a greasy coin filling his senses.

He stumbles around, trying to get a solid grip on her arm so he can turn her over his head but grabbling at slick nothing—the siren of the gunshot makes him freeze. The woman goes limp, sliding off and to the ground; he turns hotly and there’s Kyle, gun in hand, smoke billowing from the barrel. Blood seeps from the body.

“Jesus Christ,” Kyle exclaims, eyes wide.

Surveying the scene which they so narrowly escaped from being dinner, Marcus thinks that it’s a ridiculous sentiment, breathing that name as if He has anything to do with it. “From the looks of it, kid, God left a long time ago.”

A remark righteously confirmed the next day by the harvesters. He loses his grip for a split second and Kyle and Star are stolen from him.

\- - -

“The devil’s hands have been busy.”

Up close, John Connor is brusque, rancor and crooked in the mind. The idolatry voice from the radio is an octave deeper in person with little trace of kindness or reassurance.  There are white and red scars alike peaking out of cuffs and collars, his knuckles scabbed and burned of skin, the price of battle colder than the inspective eyes roving over his body.

He feels forcefully exposed, torn from his place and residing in another cage, a zoo animal placed on display for the children to throw rocks and coins at. Shackled, pinioned, moored to this dangling contraption, he withers in protest to the objectification, making his presence further known with the clanking. 

There are three others alongside John Connor: a tall, dark-skinned man fidgets to his left, index finger tapping his gun threateningly; beautiful Blair, the pilot he’d arrived with (Resistance base, that’s where he is), glances around uncomfortably by the door, chewing on her thumb nail, refusing to look at him; and a redheaded woman, pregnant stomach protruding, talks to him in medical terms, wedding band catching in the overhead light.

There’s equanimity in her voice, non-judging as her gaze flits to him periodically, although it’s evident that he’s a science project she’s eager to get her hands on. She wouldn’t be the first one.

“My name…is Marcus Wright.” It’s a feeble attempt and it doesn’t work, but he has to do what he can. They have to see; he isn’t a toy, he isn’t a mole that’s snuck behind enemy lines.

He has to…he has…go… _Kyle._

“You think you’re human?” John Connor inquires, crossing his arms over his chest.

Marcus sags. “I am human.”

The metal under his skin, the shine that operates his skeleton, so bizarrely reminiscent of a comic book character, tells a different story, makes him a liar. But he has a heart and a conscious and a brain that’s telling him he has to get out of this or his pack will die. That has to count for something.

He thrashes and rages, punctuates the bruised around him, but to no avail. Invisible noose around his neck, he’s close to a hanging.

“Let me down.”

John Connor approaches him, tips of his boots hanging off the edge of the platform, and the coldness in those eyes reaches into the last corner of what semblance of a soul he retrieved when he woke up to this nightmare. This man, for all his esoteric talk and sagacious advice, isn’t going to let him go. He can’t be reasoned with, can’t be bargained or negotiated with. This man wants nothing more than to watch him burn. Goddamn him.

“You and me, we’ve been at war since before either of us even existed,” John Connor breathes huskily.

Marcus snorts. This shit again. The chains are heavy, ripping through pulse and point, clanking with unsteady movements. Machine or not, these are binds that his strength cannot break. He startles, however, for good sport.

“You tried killing my mother, Sarah Connor. You killed my father, Kyle Reese.”

_Wait. Kyle? Kyle. Let me go, let me go._

“Kyle Reese,” Marcus seethes, words dripping with molasses, “is on a transporter heading for Skynet.”

\- - -

John Connor disappears after five minutes, the women following until Marcus is left with this Lieutenant Barnes. He ruffled the man’s feathers, he can tell, but he won’t apologize for feeling smug about it. He needs to know what he’s in for if he’s going to hold a prisoner of war.

Barnes starts sprouting off stories—childhood anecdotes, survivors tales, all meaningless to him—of his brother, a man who had the misfortune of dying not too long ago, volleying his Colt between palms, smirking and laughing curtly in fondness. Marcus watches him wearily, anticipating that bullet.

In this lifetime, guns solve everything. Men have forfeited their power to an unfathomable guarantee, to an unsteady promise of a better tomorrow. No such thing is coming, he knows, and he’s been here all of six days.

Sure enough, Barnes raises the muzzle and fires off two shots, one tapering in his collarbone, the other embedding in his small intestine. He doesn’t flinch when Barnes pulls the trigger a third time.

_Kyle. Star. Kyle. Kyle_.

\- - -

Blair gets him out in under an hour, John Connor allows him to escape two minutes after that ( _“I’m the only hope you have left.”_ ) and he’s green-lighted by Skynet’s security in one day. The robots identify him as one of their own.

How foreboding.

The scripture across his forehead might as well read: Abandon all hope ye who enter here.

The warehouses loom ahead, prismatic and distinguishable even in the gloom, and he exhales.

“I’m comin’ for you.” 

\- - -

He saw this movie his second year in Gen Pop, something futuristic and slightly portending. In it he remembers the man with the metal skeleton—not his fault, never his fault—turn around sharply and tell the white-haired woman chasing him, “There’s a war coming. You sure you’re on the right side?”

The willowy woman tipped her chin boldly and rebutted, “At least I’ve chosen a side.” 

As he digs his fingers into the back of his head, ignoring the trail of blood seeping between the seams, Marcus chooses his side. Discarding sprinkles of the microbe chip, he makes it known.

The mirage of Dr. Kogan, luminescent and icy, snaps her mouth closed, disappointed with her greatest experiment gone awry. “You will not be given a second chance.”

“Bite me.” 

\- - -

He isn’t sure what he’s expecting when he clamors into the chopper. Not a hero’s welcome. Not a thank-you. Probably not even an ‘are you all right?’ But the look on Kyle’s face doesn’t even cross his mind after what they’ve just been through. Kyle stares at him with a simmering resentment, keeping small embers that only have to drop to ignite the hatred cloaked, so Marcus closes his iron fist, that shredded sleeve of flesh exposed and vulnerable to repulsion.

_I am human, I am human, I am human._

He should say something—wants to say something—but he can only stare right back, the two locked in a passage of betrayal, anger and pleas. The cacophony of the exploding central reverberates in his ears, clouding the air, but they do not break.

_Please understand._

It’s still a bit of a fog: that translucent face that couldn’t be real, the chip that ghosts the back of his skull, all the information flittering beneath his fingertips, his for the taking if he could just focus. It’s right in front of him, visible, tangible, but he can’t make sense of it yet.

But if what Dr. Kogan said was true then he was programmed for Kyle. Programmed to want him, programmed to bring him…programmed for _only_ him.

(And here he thought this wasn’t fucked up enough already.) 

\- - -

Their lodestar, their prophet, their savior is dying.

They need a heart, any heart.

There are tears in the wife’s eyes, her hand resting fearfully on her swollen belly, the omnipresent tab that this child will have the bad luck of growing up without its father if John Connor is to perish.

“Kate,” Marcus says hoarsely, “take mine.”

A collection of heads whip around to look at him, each mirroring the others incredulous expression, though he notices the wheels already turning in Kate’s head, calculating how his offer can be taken upon. Beautiful Blair emits a minute hiccup, eyes brimming with tears, and John Connor wheezes from the makeshift gurney, but it’s Kyle he sees. 

\- - -

The procedure has to happen quickly, Kate says. Before he changes his mind, before John Connor loses consciousness, before she’s too emotionally unstable to keep her hands from shaking, Marcus doesn’t know. He just does what he’s told and that, at the moment, is strip off the shirt and lie on the table. All the spectators were instructed to vacate and they did so obediently, each looking between the two men as if wondering if John Connor would really be alive when they returned.

Star had hugged him before leaving with Virginia, latching on so tightly that it took him plus two others to coax her off, and he won’t deny that his heart had broken a little. If she didn’t understand his choice now, she would in the future, when she was older and maybe asked Kyle about the bionic man in her own mute way. 

Kyle wanted to stay, didn’t want to go with Virginia or Blair, insisted that he be there when Marcus went under, but Kate, bless her, explained why he couldn’t, why he needed to leave. He staying would cause Marcus stress and stress elevated blood pressure which forced the heart to pump blood faster, spelling disaster for the entire transplant.

“He won’t go through with this if you’re here,” she whispered quietly, just to Kyle although Marcus could hear. He left seconds later, attention not straying, fighting with a sword and shield to not disobey orders.

Marcus is gracious that Kyle’s not here to see this, lying on the table—no one needs to see this. He watches from the corner of his eye as Kate, body encased in the sterile white coat, preps, flicking syringes and vials, situating trays, straightening tubes over their heads. He sees John Connor smile up at his wife, the only evidence of affection that the man is capable of such a thing, and reach up to brush his hand over her stomach.

“What are you going to name it?” Marcus inquires abruptly, turning his head towards them.

“Um,” Kate hums, “Sarah if it’s a girl. We haven’t picked a name for a boy yet. Maybe we’ll name him Marcus.”

“No, you won’t,” Marcus chides playfully.

Kate shrugs then, in one fell swoop, looms overhead, encompassing his whole periphery (not that he complains; she’s nice to look at). “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Yeah.”

She rests her hand on his chest, fingers splayed, head cocked to the side. No one’s ever been kind to him; the warmth in her eyes is a bit disconcerting. “You’re a good man.”

And no one’s certainly called him that, though a couple have tried recently. Before he can say anything she’s gone, hand whisked away, looping around the table and picking up the IV needle. He breathes deeply, eyes closing, willing the strings of nerves to stop their fluttering. Damn, he didn’t think he’d be doing this for a second time. Save humanity, save humanity, he chants. He restrains a flinch when the needle punctures his skin, trying not to think of the way he can feel it dragging into his arm, going further, deeper, before it’s seated and taped.

There’s suddenly a sharp cry of his name and then Kyle bursts through the drawn tent flap, winded, hair askew on his forehead. “Kyle, get out,” Marcus barks non-too-gently.

_Gotta let me go._

The roughness doesn’t faze the kid. Warm fingers twine with the flesh of cold steel. “If you’re doing this for us you’re not doing this alone. Screw your stress,” he objects to Kate pointedly, “I’m staying.”

“Stubborn ass.”

Kyle smirks.

“I’m putting you under now,” Kate informs. “Say your good-byes.”

There’s a momentary beat of silence, the next sequence of events weighing heavily on the present party. A stranger made of rival technology making a self-effacing decision to save the life of someone he dislikes; must be a sea change.

The tears Kyle was fighting earlier have altered, gone and replaced by shining orbs of something else entirely: hope. “I’m glad to have known you, despite the circumstances. But we’ll meet again, roadkill,” he promises with an omniscient twist of the lips.

Marcus offers a small smile, hardly there but he knows Kyle recognizes it. Brushing a wayward curl from the kid’s forehead, he wishes through fortune-fold that he could commit this to memory, store it in a file to be revisited time and time again. He loves the way he looks right now, with his head canted and a fondness Marcus knows he’ll never let go of reflected. Even when times get hard and all else seems lost, he hopes Kyle will remember this, remember what a man from his past did for him, for humanity. He hopes he’ll be remembered this way, only this way.

Who knew he’d actually find something to miss in this hellhole. Maybe he could’ve been happy here. He could’ve adjusted, worked alongside John Connor, taught Kyle to drive, raised Star, fought the machines. Possibilities for an alternate life shrouded in darkness with two words.

Damn.

“See you in another life, kid,” he gets out, trying his hardest to waver the lump in his throat. But Kyle’s brow furrows and Marcus knows he heard the falter because his eyes get brighter somehow.

He knows it’ll be better this way. It has to be. And he has to believe it. Kyle, Star, they’ll be better without him. He knows he brings danger; always has. They’ll be safe here.

They’ll be safe...

\- - -

The world is a little different than before Marcus left it. There’s a photograph in his hand and one man’s heart in another man’s chest, the base is flooded with people and he’s sharing quarters with a guy named Tyler who asks too many questions about camp gossip (Yes, I’m that Kyle Reese. No, I’m not John Connor’s brother. Shut up about Marcus Wright, you don’t know anything about him).

Kyle tries to be normal. He trains with the others, goes on a couple routine assignments, takes care of Star when he can, even babysits the little girl that automatically wraps nearly everyone around her finger…But the way people look at him sometimes, like he’s a leech, a traitor, untrustworthy for being friends with a half-breed. For eight months he tries to denounce Marcus’ memory, tries to pretend he never existed, tries to fit in. Because doing that would make it so much easier.

Yet, he finds that—the pretending, the censorship—to be impossible. He subconsciously carries bits of Marcus with him at all times like a bad habit, just can’t not. The man is a part of his roots, always in one thought or another action or his very words.

Kyle never fit in. Not in his entire life. He realizes after year two years that fitting in isn’t worth denying himself, not any piece.

\- - -  

John Connor tells him who he really is on year eight. They argue and Kyle hits him then locks himself in his room for two days. He doesn’t let anyone in, not Star, not Tyler, not even the girl he dated briefly his third year on base. Friends leave food at the door, but it’s still there hours later, untouched, ignored, flies salvaging gleefully.

He wishes Marcus were around. He’d know what to say, what to do, would’ve stayed in the room with him till he was ready to face reality, never pushing, never prying.

“What’d I do? Why’d you choose me? I don’t want to be special.”

\- - -     

He accepts his fate anyway.

\- - -   

The Resistance keeps going for a decade, but then things gradually get worse. People start dying faster, Skynet gets stronger, new models are built and they’re outnumbered. Earth is finally falling into the shithole its powers that be unnecessarily created.

Within six months they’re living in poverty. In another month a third of John Connor’s army has starved to death.

_\- - -_

Somehow Barnes gets wind of an attack Skynet plans on surprising them with in two days. All the women and children are transferred to a refugee camp on the California-Arizona border and Blair entrusts her three-year-old son to Star, despite the nineteen-year-olds belligerent objections.

Forehead pressed into hers, this twenty-six-year-old doesn’t let his façade falter. He’s always been the best actor of the two; amidst the madness, he can’t let his skill fail now. “I’ll meet you there.”

Star stares at him with that expression reminiscent of her past self that wore hats and never talked. She knows he’s lying, knows that where he’s going it isn’t to the border. She hugs him because he’s not coming back and she gets into the truck because it’s what he needs her to do, the last request. As the truck skids off, she tries not to dwell on the fact that she’s lost the last of her family.

John Connor corners Kyle on the way to the labs the next day when the aircrafts are inbound, brandishing orders, but doesn’t go with him. Kyle goes through the trained sequence without assistance, shots firing on the ground above him, and no one is there to hold his hand before the white takes over.

\- - -

He arrives, shivering, as naked as the day he came. The sidewalks are cold and the people are edgy and it’s exactly how Marcus described it.

It’s beautiful. Unmarred, a little less tragic and a little more fair-weather.

He wonders, huddled in a damp alley, leaning heavily against a dumpster, in 19-fucking-84, briefly about him and coils the wires securely to his limb (tethered to the hand, tethered to the heart), slipping the weapon up his sleeve as he walks, forsaking John Connor’s teachings and abiding by his instincts.

Kyle taught himself to track early on and finds Sarah Connor without incident, she moving frenetically inside a diner from table to table, plates balanced precariously on her arm. She’s more stunning than in the picture he once owned, a riot of bouncing waves and a too-naïve smile. The machines are coming—they’ll figure out what he did and send one after him, after her, and she has no idea.

Her existence is about to change. It’s iniquitous to burden her with fate, unfair to make her dance with destiny when she’s some innocent nobody with a job and maybe a cat.

But destiny rarely calls upon its chosen at a moment of their convenience, Kyle muses. He never chose this either.

“Come with me if you want to live,” he says hours later, the terminator staggering behind him, screams echoing in the clearing techno club, and she follows just as promptly as the first recipient of the line had.

\- - -

Later he sits in a police station, cuffed to a barbarically uncomfortable plastic chair, surrounded by men who think he’s crazy (maybe he is, but why are their uniforms blue?). Sarah is taken to another room for her protection, looking over her shoulder at him, paper cup in hand, and that panic that he once saw in Marcus stabs his gut.

“What day is it?” he demands. “What year?”

\- - -

Kyle’s paranoia and gibberish frightens Sarah, not made any clearer than when she cowers against the concrete wall of the tunnel they temporarily hide in after escaping the station massacre, but that slowly changes. Tucked in a reedy motel, understanding sets in, belief materializes and she listens.

Pandora’s Box is passed on.

He fulfills his obligation. She’s loving and inviting and accepts him in the same fashion that she’ll accept their son, will teach him what he’s taught her. So dying in order to protect her doesn’t seem as bad as he thought. He did something right, noble, good, and he knows what’s waiting for him on the other side, left fielder.

Sarah is safe. John will be safe. Star is safe. Marcus will be safe.

They’ll all be okay.    

_See you in another life._


End file.
